A Night at the Cinema: Zeffirelli's Otello and the Genre of Film-Opera

Abstract

In the Marx Brothers' hilarious satire of II Trovatore in A Night at the Opera (1935), a slice of staged opera becomes part of Hollywood lore. Well before that, even in the silent era, cinema was adapting opera to the conditions of visual reproduction. A famous example is the 1915 version of Carmen starring Geraldine Farrar. Opera on film has continued ever since. In our present age of media saturation via MTV, interactive video, Walkman, and Internet, it may be timely to explore meanings of adaptation from opera, a live medium, to film, a mechanized one. This essay considers such meanings in a study of visuality in Franco Zeffirelli's film Otello (1986), an important cinematic interpretation of a canonic opera.

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